24 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



women and children who had followed the breadwinner to the 

 scene of his labour. Sir Charles Hotham had declared that it was 

 through their influence that the restless population could be best 

 restrained, and said that he would rather see an army of ten thou- 

 sand women on the goldfields than an equal number of soldiers. 



The mining population of the Ballaarat district at this period 

 may be taken as a fair sample of the 70,000 men employed in 

 similar work throughout the colony. It is very evident from 

 official despatches and reports that the Executive of the day were, 

 even after three years' experience, widely mistaken in their estimate 

 of the diggers as a class. Possibly biassed by the reports of 

 Vigilance Committees and Lynch Law in California, they were 

 inclined to regard them as desperate adventurers, given over to 

 wild debauchery in the hour of their success, and to lawless violence 

 and pillage in the days of their failure. There were, of course, 

 besotted loafers and crime-stained scoundrels in a crowd so quickly 

 lured from all parts of the world by the magnetic lust of gold. But 

 the main body of these hardy adventurers consisted of a very 

 different class, and included many of the pioneers of the best 

 in colonial democracy. They represented the denizens of many 

 lands, and the followers of many occupations. Besides the mingled 

 tides that had flowed in from other countries Great Britain had 

 sent forth thousands of stalwart artisans, agriculturists, factory 

 hands, seamen, and some practical miners from Northumberland 

 and Cornwall. In every hundred of these expatriated Britons 

 would be found two or three men gathered from another social 

 plane junior cadets of noble families; graduates of the historic 

 universities ; barristers, of whom more than one have actually 

 exchanged their digger's' costume for the ermine-trimmed robe of 

 the Bench ; army officers who had been decorated in the Queen's 

 service, and scores of pensioners who had fought under her flag. 

 A thousand of such men, or even half the number, scattered amidst 

 the swirling crowd, gave form and resolution to their daily action. 

 As a rule, the wild orgies of drunkenness, by which the authorities 

 judged the mass, were confined to a few disreputable public-houses, 

 where, if by chance an incautious miner got entangled, he was 

 hocussed and robbed, and sometimes murdered. For the rest, the 



